The Dandy Warhols

The Dandy Warhols played to a packed out Enmore Theatre tonight. I was kicked out of the venue after the 3 songs, but told I could come back in if I cloaked my camera gear (which there was no way I was going to do). So I ended up driving home in a little over an hour and in the last hour since getting home, have managed to download the the shots onto my very ill and slow computer, sort through the 120 or so photos, gently massage the best ones in photoshop, upload to flickr and finally make a blog post, possibly resulting in my most efficient performance on a gig night EVER!

Lighting was pretty spectacular with a nifty LED array at the back, but what we saw overall was mostly backlit and not much from the front, meaning lots of silhouettes and dimly lit faces.

jacinta, i really don’t know what the secret is, but i’ll share what i do.
bump the contrast up using a gentle s-curve in the curves. then, using colour balance, do one thing to the cyan/red, and then do the exact opposite to the yellow/blue. if the shot is too cold (blue), you’ll end up with the cyan/red in the positives and yellow/blue in the negatives, and vice versa for a warm (yellow) shot. it’s a poor man’s method of adjusting white balance in photoshop. it’s very subtle, you should never have to go much above 10-15 for either the cyan/red or yellow/blue. i just wrote a little photoshop action that does the curves adjustment layer and the colour balance once i’ve imported the raw in (using the as-shot white balance and default other settings). obviously, slight tweaking of the contrast and colour balance is required depending on the shot and sometimes, you’ll have to adjust one of the colour balance settings without adjusting the other as much.. whatever is needed though!

will, i struggle a bit mate, but i definitely think RAW helped me! i might just be a convert. ;)